Oof.

Oof.

It started raining and snow/slush-ing Sunday, and it's been doing it ever since, with very little pause. Sunday night we had scaryily high winds. I'm thankful that we've taken care of our trees over the years, and the really ancient ones have cables keeping them from breaking apart. One of the not-so-ancient ones is now across one end of the driveway.


I didn't want to walk down and take a closer picture, but it's a big, fat, oak tree. I've already cleared away the smaller branches. I can't make this thing budge when I throw my weight against it. So today's chore (avoiding by blogging about it, natch) is to get at least one of the chainsaws* repaired and cut up the tree so I can move it out of the driveway. We have a circular drive, so I can actually get out; this is really more a nuisance than a catastrophe.

The rain is enough that the basement is getting water in it, so I'm also monitoring this:

As long the pump keeps spitting water out, we're good. When it gets overworked, the motor sometimes conks out; it works again after I unplug it and give it a little rest. The rain keeps on coming today, though, so I'm really hoping the pump is having a good day.

And here are a couple of the new plants cheering up the place:


In between the survival-mode stuff, I am closing in on the end of my pair of socks in progress - the green Austermann ones that have been taking forever. They probably take forever because I haven't been knitting very much. Funny how that works, eh?

Oh! I finally got tired of not being qualified to go anywhere near the kind of lab work I've been fascinated by for twenty years or so, so I've signed up to take a course in neurobiology at Harvard Extension School. Whee! Very excited, the weasel is. Summer schedule - it'll be eight weeks starting kind of close to my birthday. So part of the answer to "what the hell do I do with the rest of my life" is to try to get myself into a position where I can do cognitive neuroscience research, maybe some basic structural stuff, maybe other stuff. I read an article about this exciting breakthrough at the joint MIT/Harvard lab, and they've mapped the folds in the cortex with MRI for different stages of development: infant, child, young adult. They've got MRI pictures of what normal brains look like at different ages. What struck me was, they're just getting around to this NOW?? holy crap! let me in there! geez! I could sit on my butt, or I could start taking steps toward something I want. It's going to take forever, but a step is better than nothing.

Onward with the day, and everything else. Cheerio, all.

*we have four chainsaws. none of them work.